Mark Del Franco - Uncertain Allies

I pushed myself up. “Murdock, wait.”

He paused, glanced over his shoulder, then swung his gun toward me. “What is that stuff? What do you want me to do?”

The dark mass was bleeding out of my eye. I held my hand out in a calming gesture, concentrating on forcing the darkness back inside. “It’s the thing in my head. Stay away.”

Gun focused on me, he circled, a look of horror on his face. “What should I do?”

“Nothing. Stay out of reach.”

The darkness in the street swirled with deep violet light. As I forced myself to walk toward it, the dark mass in my head flexed, a finger of pain running along my jaw. The vision dimmed in my right eye as pressure built behind it. I caught the wall as I lost my balance. Pain swarmed the right side of my head. I went blind and tripped as the dark mass sliced out of my right eye.

The darkness in the street loomed over me like a claw. It paused, tendrils of black vapor waving in the air. The blade of darkness from my eye splintered and reached for the tendrils. The two strands of darkness connected, and a concussive jolt like electricity threw me against the wall. The dark mass whipped back inside my head, and I fell.

Murdock leaned over me. “You okay?”

I lifted my head. The darkness in the street had vanished. The street had become dead space, no vestige of essence on it. My head echoed with the emptiness. “Where’s the dwarf?”

Murdock helped me up. “Over there.”

The dwarf lay in the street, his body signature dim, his gaze fixed on the sky as he struggled to breathe. We huddled over him. Up close, a faint spark of essence remained in him, but I didn’t see it lasting long. The pavement beneath him was devoid of essence. “Get him against the wall. He might be able to draw essence from the stone.”

I didn’t know if it would work, but without a healer, he had little hope of surviving. Murdock helped me move the body into a seated position against the wall. The dwarf’s head slumped to his chest. I patted at his face. “Come on, buddy, tap the stone. You need essence.”

His eyes fluttered. A feeble trickle of essence came out of his chest as he tried to use his body signature to tap the stone. I scanned the wall and street. The darkness had leeched essence from the surroundings. “This whole area is stripped, Leo. There’s nothing for him to pull. Let’s get him farther up the street.”

With frustrating slowness, we carried him. The pavement was uneven cobbles, and dwarves are heavy.

“I’m dying,” the dwarf said.

“Hold on a few more feet,” I said.

“She wanted the stone,” he said.

A sense of dread swept over me. “Who?”

The dwarf wheezed. “She was in my head. She wanted the stone.”

“We have to move faster,” I said to Murdock.

“Two druids were chasing me. I don’t know who they are,” said the dwarf.

“Hang on. We’re almost there,” I said.

Essence reasserted itself in the street as we neared the pedestrian tunnel. The weight of the dwarf increased with each step. “He’s fading, Leo,” I said.

A shout rang out, the sound of nearby voices calling a death knell. At the same instant, the dwarf fell from of our hands, his weight too great to hold any longer. I rested my hand on his chest. “He’s gone, Leo.”

Angry, I stalked away, banging my fist on a wall. I glared up the street, searching for some sign of the darkness. Essence was creeping back into the pavement and the walls, thin and weak. At the far end of the street, a burst of bright blue light surged out of a gap between buildings. It filled the street, moved toward me, then stopped. Indiscernible darker blue shapes moved within it. I took a step, intent on chasing after it, when it gathered into itself and retreated the way it had come. It vanished around a corner.

“Did you see that?” I asked Murdock.

He turned toward me. “What?”

“The blue light I’ve been tracking. It was at the end of the street. I want to say it was checking out what just happened,” I said.

Murdock shook his head. “I missed it. I was searching the body. Look what I found.” He held up a stone identical to the ones on the previous victims.

“Whatever he was selling wasn’t essence, Leo.”

“That dark stuff that attacked you looked like what came out of the leanansidhe we found,” he said.

The leanansidhe were fey predators that survived by absorbing essence from people. Leo and I stumbled into one a few months back. When I said stumble, I meant almost were killed by her. “I was thinking the same thing. Same dark tendrils. Same indigo and violet essence light surrounding it. All this time, I thought she was dead.”

“Dead? You never mentioned the leanansidhe again after you told Keeva about it. I thought the Guild finally stepped up and dealt with a criminal in the Weird,” he said.

I had gone to Keeva macNeve at the Guild. She had taken it upon herself to hunt down the leanansidhe . She found it, but it got the better of her. She almost died, which was why she had needed to go to Tara to finish out her pregnancy. “I forgot about it. I never checked to make sure it was dead.”

Hands on his hips, he sighed. “We can go tomorrow.”

I frowned. “Where?”

He looked up at me. “Where we found the leanansidhe . Don’t pretend you aren’t thinking about it. Promise me you won’t go without me,” he said.

“She can’t hurt me, Leo. That’s why the dwarf didn’t die right away. My presence interrupted her feeding.”

“Promise me,” he said.

I glared at him. He was with me when we found the leanansidhe . It knocked him on his ass. She wasn’t going to be happy to see me after what happened. “Leo . . .”

“I will lock you in a cell,” he said.

I laughed. “You will not.”

He shook his head. “Fine. I’ll tell Briallen, then. Or Eorla or whoever else I can think of who will tie you up and dump you in a corner until you get some common sense.”

I chuckled. “You’re as stupid as I am.”

He grinned. “Maybe, but I have a gun.”

The leanansidhe were feared by even the powerful Danann fairies. They fed on living essence, preferring the strong essence of people as the primary source for their needs. They lived in obscurity, hidden away from world, finding ways to survive that might go unnoticed. When they were noticed, they were hunted to death. Few people met them and lived.

I had met one named Druse. She called me her brother. She meant it metaphorically, but she wasn’t that far from the truth. After years of no one understanding what the dark mass in my head was, she knew something. Her fey ability to drain essence used a form of the same darkness. She showed me how it worked and how to find pleasure in it. She showed me a side to myself, a desire within, that disgusted me. She showed me how easy it can be to intend to kill someone. Using the darkness, I had tasted the essence of a living person—Keeva, my old partner at the Guild. That was bad enough. What made it worse was that on some level, I recognized what I was doing and didn’t stop right away. For that, I was ashamed. Many things I’ve done wrong in my life have made me feel guilty, but the night I almost killed Keeva made me truly ashamed.

When Druse showed me how to use the darkness, I felt pain, but a pain with a twisted pleasure to it. Druse had linked her mind to mine and wouldn’t let go. When we used the darkness in sync with each other, we bonded on an intimate level. When we worked in opposition, the individual darknesses within us rejected each other, and we blacked out, like what had happened to me last night. I had seen the darkness kill again, its waving tendrils of shadow sapping away the life of their victim. The darkness in my head had responded to it.